by Win Blevins
The Crows made sounds that sounded like a giggly version of, ‘Oh-oh.’
“A grizzly bear came to me and gave me a sacred song. I will sing it for you.”
Awē’raxkēta bāwasa’cīwa
Immediately all the Crows began to laugh loudly.
Bacū’ca daxē’tsixēre
Tsēt’ ācu tsi’cikyāta Tsēt ācu tsicikyāta
Awaku’saat ērusak’
Īs ara’papēi awakōwate barappēkyāta
The laughter got louder, and people pounded their own legs, or each other’s backs, in hilarity.
Ciwicī’kyātawe
Mi’cgy iaxba’sūrake ōpī’rake haha huhu haha huhu.
People were holding their faces laughing. Tears squeezed between their fingers.
Sam had never felt more left out in his life.
“Is song sing for child sleep,” said Blue Medicine Horse to Sam and Gideon. Sam looked at the young man in surprise. “Story silly—I run, fall hurt leg, the wearer the wolf mask, his face itches, he wants be like dogs, they smoke after eat. You sing a child to sleep with this.”
“Yeah, it’s a lullaby. What’s funny,” said Rose, “is that I pretend it’s a sacred song my animal guide gave me in a vision quest.”
“E!” cried female Crow voices—go on with the story.
He did. “The bear, he promised I would do great things on the warpath, as long as I never ate bear meat.
“Soon I went out alone against the Sioux nation. I cut a thousand horses out of their pony herds”—now people began to laugh again. “They sent five hundred men against me. The first one, he came from the east with his face painted red. I killed him with my rifle. The second one, he came from the south with his face painted yellow—I killed him with one shot from my pistol. The third one came from the west and his face was painted black. I killed him with my tomahawk. The fourth one came from the north, his face painted white. I killed him with my knife.”
Rose accompanied each of these murders with preposterous, exaggerated pantomimes—his audience was screaming with hilarity.
“E! E!”
His next foes he killed in creative ways. He drew his breath in mightily and knocked one into the river with a single huff. Another he strangled with his own hair. A third he pretended to kiss and drowned with a gush of water from his mouth. Another one, he slipped the fellow’s moccasins off, put them back on the wrong way, and the fellow found himself running away. And so on, and so on. He came back home in triumph, and every woman wanted him.
The women screeched at this.
Nothing had made the Crows laugh, though, as much as the lullaby doing the work of a sacred song.
Sam looked at Blue Medicine Horse curiously. “You speak English?”
“Little. Rose, he teach.” The fellow was perhaps a little older than Sam and had a noble-looking face, like he should be a leader. Sam liked him.
Rose said, “Now you must honor us with a story, Gray Hawk.”
Gray Hawk told three stories. The one Sam remembered best was the last, about the first time he saw white people. Rose translated:
“Several other boys and me went hunting beaver. Off by myself, I found a beaver lodge. Wanting to see the inside, I dived underneath and then crawled up a tunnel into the home. It was dark in there, and tight. I was tired. I slept a little, or maybe I fainted, I’m not sure.
“When I woke up, it was still very dark in there, but now I could hear my companions somewhere far off—they were singing a death song for me.
“Then I realized I could see something. A man and woman were sitting by a pool in the forest. They were white! That scared me—I had never seen such people.
“With great effort I struggled back to the daylight and went immediately to the pool of water I saw. There I beat a hole in the ground with my war club and sat down to watch it. Before long I saw the nose of an old male beaver poke up. I grabbed him and dragged him out. Two female beavers followed the old man out, and they were mine too.
“These beavers, they were the white people I saw sitting by the pool. I know that because beavers and whites are the craftiest people on earth, and must belong to the same species.”
After this story, Sam realized some women and children in the back had gone to sleep. Gideon stood, like it was time to go home. Sam thanked his host, and then made a point of thanking Blue Medicine Horse. Maybe he could make a friend.
The next morning Sam asked Rose about Gray Hawk’s story. Rose didn’t seem to find anything odd about it.
“But it’s different from the way we tell stories.”
“How?”
Sam thought. “The story goes forward like ours, sort of, but it also drifts sideways, like a dream.”
Rose laughed. “You got a lot to learn about Crow stories. They are big storytellers.”
Sam blurted, “You’ve got to teach me Crow!”
Rose cocked an eyebrow at him and shook his head. “What you got to trade?” he asked. When Sam hesitated, thinking how poor he was, Rose walked away.
Sam eased quietly down the slope. Moving silently was much easier here than in the forests. Pine needles didn’t crackle, and there were no leaf-bearing trees except right by the creeks and the river.
He was hunting. He didn’t expect to see elk or deer, really, within a few hundred yards of camp. But winter camp was tedious sometimes, and he had to do something. He hadn’t gone into this brushy draw before.
He came on a scene he thought he shouldn’t see. Two men, Blue Medicine Horse and a gray hair, came out of a low hut perfectly naked. The gray hair crossed the clearing and hung his head down in weariness. Blue Medicine Horse nearly stumbled toward a boulder to sit. Both men looked bleary and exhausted.
Sam needed a moment to understand. The sweat lodge. They were holding a sweat lodge. He was sure he shouldn’t go near the sweat lodges, and never had. He hadn’t known one was in this draw.
Then he really saw the coyote. It was slinking toward the two men, trembling, agitated. It would quiver and kind of jump sideways, not at all the way a coyote would slip up. It was slobbering.
Sam threw his rifle to his shoulder and fired.
The coyote tumbled straight into the clearing.
Both Crows began to shout angrily.
Sam wanted to run off, but he made himself walk forward.
The gray-hair ran up to the coyote. Sam poked at it with his rifle and pointed the muzzle at the slobber.
“Understand,” said Blue Medicine Horse. “Understand. Thank you. Sam, thank you.”
The gray hair said a lot of words Sam didn’t understand, but they sounded friendly, plenty friendly.
“Sam,” said Blue Medicine Horse, “wait here, you please, wait here. We must …”
The gray hair went back into the low, dome-like hut covered with buffalo robes. Blue Horse took a forked stick and, one at a time, in a ritualistic manner, picked up hot stones with it and put them in the lodge. Before long he ducked into the lodge, stuck his head out and held up a finger toward Sam, and closed the last robe behind him.
Sam sat. He yearned to have an idea, any idea, what they were doing, but he didn’t. They sang a long song, or it was more like a chant. By turns they each said a lot of words, like praying. Sam could hear water being poured on the hot rocks almost continuously, and steam hissing up.
Finally the robe door opened, steam vented out, and Blue Medicine Horse’s head followed. He looked dizzy from the heat. Both of them came out, smiled at Sam, and sat, resting, like they were dazed.
When they got dressed, they took Sam into camp and paraded him around, crying out to everyone. People came out to look at Sam. Rose came rushing up.
“What are they saying?” Sam asked.
“My boy,” Rose said with a big grin, “you’re a hero.”
Gray Hawk announced he was going to have a fine supper cooked in Sam’s honor.
Gray Hawk intended to make this gesture in front of Sam’s friends too—Gideon, Diah, Clyma
n, Fitzpatrick, Sublette, Rose and his family, all were invited, and anyone else Sam wanted.
He decided not to share the meal any more widely.
They all smoked the beautiful, long pipe Gray Hawk brought out, with proper offerings to each of the four directions, the sky, and the earth. The ceremony was solemn.
They ate with plenty of laughter, and Sam had to admit the stew was tasty.
Rose said that if this was other Indians on special occasions, they’d be eating dog. Only the Crows did not consider dog a delicacy. Then he had a lot of fun in English with the notion of eating dog. “Oh, poor Fido,” he cried in lachrymose tones, “such a sad fate. Oh noble beast, man’s best friend, brought down so low.” He elaborated this theme, making quite a comic performance.
Sam couldn’t help laughing and was glad the Crows didn’t understand English.
Every time Needle ladled stew from the pot, Rose would say, “Down, boy, down! Down!”
The hearts of the two races seemed good that night.
After supper Gray Hawk said he wanted to give Sam something big for saving the life of his son. He had heard of something Sam wanted. Gray Hawk would make it possible. Rose would teach Sam the Crow language. Gray Hawk would give Rose two horses for his efforts.
Blue Medicine Horse pitched in that he wanted to work with Sam and Rose, so he could learn more English while Sam learned Crow.
Sam said that sounded like a kit and caboodle of fun.
Every day from then on, all morning, Sam and Blue Medicine Horse sat in front of Rose’s lodge, and the mulatto taught one English and the other Crow. The two young men helped each other, modeling pronunciation, correcting idiom. Then they wandered the camp together, Blue Medicine Horse speaking English, Sam faltering along in Crow. At the same time they both practiced the signs for what they were saying. In a week they were fast friends.
After a couple of weeks Blue Medicine Horse suggested that Sam help him make some new arrows, and so learn how. Near the top of the tipi he had some shafts of willow, cut, peeled, and hung to dry. Medicine Horse said you took big ones, for the smaller would get too thin when they were scraped straight. He showed Sam how to use a deer shoulder blade with a hole drilled in it to scrape the shafts to one common diameter, and a piece of basalt with a groove worn in it to take the knots off and rub it smooth. Then came the part that required a lot of patience. You heated the shaft, rubbed oil on it to make it supple, and used a bone with a hole in it as a lever to straighten it slowly—you had to hold it a long time while it cooled. At the end of the afternoon they had some fine shafts, and Medicine Horse put his mark on them, like signing something you wrote.
Sam was amazed at the patience, concentration, and delicate skill needed to make a good arrow shaft.
Medicine Horse had already traded for a bunch of points, so that was time they wouldn’t have to spend. He had hawk feathers for the fletching. You spent a lot of hours splitting the quill and scraping the shafts thin. For today they built a low fire and set rawhide to simmering. By tomorrow it would turn gluey, and they could attach three feathers to each shaft. That would leave only one job, lashing on the points. Medicine Horse showed Sam how you would split the end of the shaft, lash that, insert the point and lash that, and then daub glue on all the lashing.
A fine and demanding craft, worth learning.
The next day, with Rose’s amused help, the two young men had an unlikely conversation in the way of getting to understand each other. Blue Medicine Horse told Sam for the first time that the Crows find white people very odd, and why.
“Odd,” said Sam, taken aback.
“Yes.”
“What’s odd about us?”
Blue Medicine thought, and then spoke carefully. “You live without women. Why don’t you have families? If you do, where are they, and why are you so far from them for such a long time? Why don’t you want to be with them?”
Rose was much amused.
Medicine Horse waited, but Sam just said, “Go on.”
“What do you care about the skins of the beaver, which are not good for much? They’re not like deerskin, which you can wear, or buffalo robes, which keep you warm.”
Medicine Horse waited, but Sam just prompted him again—“Go on.”
Rose said some words which Sam understood as reassuring Medicine Horse—“It’s all right to speak.”
“Why are the white men willing to give so scarce an object as a blanket, or even a rifle, for something as common as beaver skins, which every creek is full of? Where did the white men get so many, many of these objects, which no one else has ever seen, and no one has the medicine to make?” Blue Medicine Horse concluded, “Altogether white people are very peculiar. But it’s all right. We are willing to be good hosts, and show you around this country, which you don’t know, and show you basic things like what plants can be eaten, how to hunt with bow and arrow, what water is good to drink and what not.” He smiled at Sam, pleased with his people’s generosity. “But we wonder why you don’t know these things.”
“Tell him,” said Sam to Rose, “that I take his questions seriously and will think them over and answer every one. This will take some time.”
But in truth, Sam didn’t think he could answer some things.
That night Blue Medicine Horse came to Sam’s tipi to eat and share a social smoke. Something was bothering Sam. He knew he wasn’t being completely honest with his new friend. Finally he drawled out, and signed, “You know why I’m keen to learn Crow?”
Blue Medicine Horse looked at him curiously. “Maybe not.”
“I want to speak to your sister Meadowlark,” Sam said. “I want to ask her to be my woman.” He let it sit there like a lump.
Blue Medicine Horse gave him a very sympathetic look. “Cannot be.”
Sam gave him a sharp look. “Why?”
“Hard to explain. You come to Rose with me now.”
They found the guide sitting behind his center fire, smoking.
“Tell him.”
Sam did.
Rose shook his head. “Can’t happen, can’t happen.” He chuckled. “Here’s the story. Meadowlark wants to be one of the two girls who leads the dancers in the goose egg dance, and them girls, they gotta be virgins.” He grinned.
Sam looked crestfallen.
“Everybody knows it, she’s talked about it for months.”
“It is a beautiful dance,” said Blue Medicine Horse. “The songs are beautiful. At the end the young men, they come to the circle and kiss the girl dancers.”
Rose nodded but then said to Blue Medicine Horse. “Come back later, will ye? I want to talk to Sam jest the two of us.”
They waited for the young Crow to leave. Sam felt humiliated in his friend’s eyes.
“You don’t need to know about that dance, not especial. But if I see things right, you haven’t figured how these things go among the Crows.”
It was a question. “I guess not.”
“Women, they’re supposed to be faithful, but not really. Very few of ’em are, and everybody winks at it. So, normal-like, you and Meadowlark could make all the whooptedo you wanted to. But you picked one of the only two women in this camp you can’t have, the virgins for the goose egg dance. That’s the way that stick floats, and it ain’t gonna switch and float upstream.”
Rose waited, but Sam was too unhappy to say anything.
“Speaking of it, looks like you haven’t figured it for men neither.”
Sam looked at him, waiting.
“For men it ain’t that way at all. A beaver’s supposed to dip in everywhere he can. If you don’t, they think you’re peculiar, or lacking in some way. Way they see it, a buffalo bull mounts one cow in the herd, he don’t quit and hang around her. He goes right on and tries to mount ’em all. If he has any spunk.”
Sam made a face.
“What’s the matter?”
“Meadowlark would think bad of me.”
“The opposite,” said Rose. “Take this chi
ld’s word, the very opposite.”
Right then Sam made up his mind to show he had plenty of spunk.
They passed the winter nights not only with storytelling but with music and dancing, sometimes in the Kentuck style, sometimes the Canuck, sometimes both. Isaac Culbertson, a wiry little man with beard up to his cheekbones and a hand of the Missouri Fur outfit, sawed the fiddle the American way in that camp. Gideon liked to sit in front of his and Sam’s lodge and play French-Canadian tunes and draw a crowd to kick up their hooves.
On New Year’s Eve Gideon strolled over to the Missouri Fur camp with his fiddle—the party would be here. All the captains broke out the whiskey jugs, and the mountain men set out to have a shining time—booze and fiddling and dancing and women!
Since everyone wanted to dance, here came no slow ballads or songs of woe. Isaac purled out several tunes in the new Virginia reel form, a popular dance with two lines of facing couples. Another favorite was the old-time reel, a lively dance from the Scottish highlands; also the schottische, a round dance like a polka; and a jig, a vigorous dance in triple time with lots of jumping. In camps on the way upriver, the men had danced with each other, some taking the female part half-willingly. But now they’d taught a few young, single Crow women this sport, and those were very popular women.
Gideon’s songs were also tunes to shake a leg to, similar to country dance tunes, and no one cared that the original words were Frenchy—Gideon made those rhythms bubble and froth.
Sam had noticed that mountain men and Crow men often walked into the dark during and after these dances, looking amorous. New Year’s Eve—now’s the time, he told himself.
He had even learned, in the earlier dances, which leg to shake and when and in what direction, at least sometimes.
He stood with Diah, Fitz, and Sublette, watching. Customarily, the captain never danced, and Fitz and Sublette hardly ever stopped. The fiddlers stood near the bonfire in the center, and couples frolicked all around. Sam wondered how the devil he would get started.
He decided to watch Fitz and Sublette. Crow women—many of them only girls, really—stood outside the circle and danced along to the music standing in place. Fitz poured himself a tin cup of whiskey out of a handy jug, tossed some down, strutted right up to a shy-looking young woman, and offered her the cup. She beamed at him, emptied the cup in one swig, and handed it back to him. He flung the cup in Sam’s direction and led the young lady into the dance.
